that's definitely not communism.
Some sort of capitalist-imperialism, maybe, but definitely not communism.
2,123 karma · joined July 13, 2012
Some sort of capitalist-imperialism, maybe, but definitely not communism.
Given that I, and probably half of hacker news, preface most of my searches with "site:reddit.com", I'd say Yes. Definitely Yes.
* Cryptocurrencies who's sole reason to exist is to justify its own existence. "We need token X to perform operation Y. Operation Y is important to facilitate the trade of token X". Seriously, how many tokens exist for the only purpose of being "gas" for its own network?
* Social networks that only discuss itself and its own existence.
* Programming languages where the largest project written in that language is its own compiler.
Solutions in search of a problem, is what they are.
For example, I looked for a car review because I'm buying a new car, and 80% of the search results are guitar related content, because I play guitar and that's the vast majority of the content I normally watch.
They seem to have completely missed the point of SEARCH. It's meant to be a tool for creating targeted results. If I just wanted random content to pass my time, the landing page already does that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
The older "Project Echelon", I'm not sure how much has been confirmed about it's capabilities but it certainly did exist and was the precursor to Prism.
You can find lots of examples in movies from the 90s joking about how the NSA will know if you say certain words, like "bomb", on the telephone. They almost definitely did :)
Comedian Ari Eldjarn has a really good joke a bout "per capita". It's an economist term, but in Iceland every five year old knows the phrase, because we, as a nation, are very frequently outliers when it comes to per capita, due to the small size of the population it doesn't take much in absolute terms, to skew the average very high or very low.
Also, as an Icelander who escaped to London almost a decade ago, I agree with everything bbarn has said. Most annoying to me was the fact that I could be a top expert in my field, and still only make about 50% above median income (assuming I can even find employment in Iceland doing that work). The bell curve in Iceland is very narrow, with almost no tail. In London I'm getting paid 4-5x what I got in Iceland, with significantly lower cost of living (and no inflation linked mortgage; if you want to be outraged, read about Icelandic mortgages)
I always tell people; Iceland is a great place to live, if you're happy being an average person, who drives an average car, lives in an average house, have an average family, with common hobbies and average ambition. If you dare dreaming bigger than that, you are considered a narcissistic capitalist and nobody likes you.
People are very supportive of start-ups, as long as they're not very successful. Once they start taking off and earning money, people change their tune. Then suddenly it's all "they couldn't possibly have been that successful without corruption", and "they need to pay more taxes"...
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I remember reading comments on various social networks, where people cheered when my family's hotel business failed. A spate of cancelled bookings after WOW air went bust (people also cheered that), ended up causing cashflow problems and eventually the hotel was shuttered and the property was repossessed. In the end it was sold for more than outstanding debt and every creditor got paid, including the bank. - but oh my god people lost their collective minds about this. "Corrupt capitalist scum getting their comeuppance" was sort of the summary of people's opinions. My dad literally worked himself to death fixing up that hotel and trying to make it successful (he had a sudden heart attack on location in 2017). My mom was left with a ~10 million krona stake in the business along (~80k USD) with her siblings who had a similar stake, but for most of them this was a significant portion of their savings.
Just ordinary people trying to work hard and take a small risk to make something big happen, but people couldn't have that.
https://www.visir.is/g/202099179d (sorry, was unable to find a source in English, hopefully google translate does a decent job).
In this particular case, assistance from the Icelandic police was deemed crucial to shutting down a major Silk Road drug ring, and part of the Bitcoin funds confiscated by the FBI (355 million krona, or about $3M USD) was given to the Icelandic government. A special law then had to be approved in Parliament to enable that money to be ear-marked for cyber-crime defence.
I find it insane that funds confiscated by the police in the US can be used and spent by that police force as they seem fit. That money should clearly to into either a state of federal fund, to be re-distributed.
People need to read up on AML (anti-money laundering) laws. They are a bit insane.
Know them because I've worked in regulated financial companies for years and have had to do the mandatory training about a dozen times.
He knew the company was screwed, and it's entirely the fault of top leadership. they chose to make their own performance bonuses a priority over long-term business survival, by recklessly expanding during Covid; a strategy that literally everyone could have told them would not be sustainable.
TE is the equivalent of Gucci handbags for hipster musicians.
Same with web design (for filler images, background art, etc), and design in general; basically, anything you'd previously employ a concept artist for, you can now do most of their work with midjourney or similar tools.
https://aituts.com/midjourney-web-design/
https://80.lv/articles/a-shoot-em-up-game-made-with-midjourn...
I resisted getting a 3d printer for a long long time. This is coming from a man with a fully kitted-out woodworking shop, 2 CNC machines, welding equipment and a lot more.
I didn't see the 3d printer as being for anything besides miniature figurines and cheap tat, because that's 99 percent of what you see people printing. But it's SO useful. Adapters, enclosures, brackets, 3d printers take care of solving all those little niggly bits that are really hard to fabricate by traditional methods.
I recently upgraded to a Bambu X1 Carbon and highly recommend it. I also have a cheap flashforge resin printer which is great.
Two things I've used my printers to make, that have ended up as actual products; a guitar pedal enclosure FDM printed box with an open top, I used aluminium PCB panels from jlcpcb.com as the front panels. The result is a very professional and sleek looking design that's tough as hell. The other one is transparent push buttons for a Eurorack synth module I'm working on. I used my resin printer for this, and it allows me to make a custom button layout that sits on top of mini tact switches with backlights, and gives a user interface similar to custom-made carbon membrane buttons. - similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicone_rubber_keypad
Guess which country is super sensitive about porn? It's not China. It's not anywhere in Europe...
Since the inception of the internet and social media, what is and isn't acceptable to post online has been governed by American culture standards. Murder and violence? Absolutely fine. My wife showing partial nipple on a picture of her breastfeeding on Facebook? Instant ban!
Personally, I think the only way for social media companies to play this and not lose, is to hand over the reigns of censorship to each country, to govern for themselves.
If India wants to ban some content; cool, Facebook gives them an API/dashboard, and they can remove that content themselves.
An American state wants to ban nipples and LGBT content? Cool. Florida government can dedicate some headcount to combating that, Reddit/FB/Google just give them some tools for self service.
Of course, the effect of that censorship is only applied to requests coming from IP addresses within that region, and doesn't affect the rest of the world.
Social media companies; stop letting random governments of the world hold you accountable for censorship. Put the onus on them, provide them the tools, and blame them for their own failing strategy that they can't enforce.
In the UK, possessing a firearm is already a greater offense than most of the crimes you could commit with that firearm, shy of actually shooting/killing someone.
This is also why I laugh when people say cryptocurrencies can't be banned. Of course they can be. It's an order of magnitude easier to prove someone has access to or owns cryptocurrencies than it is to prove they used that crypto to commit a crime.
(Back to cryptoGRAPHY) - this is probably what they're going for - it's very difficult to prove you used encryption software to exchange information on criminal activities, so instead they just make the act of encrypting stuff illegal. The problem is; cryptography is everywhere, and is a fundamental part of how the modern world works. Trying to ban it isn't possible without breaking things like corporate VPNs, etc. - things that every day normal people will MISS. Ban strong encryption apps? You can literally just set up a VPS, SSH into it and use the "write" Unix command on the server locally. If the government can crack that you've lost all security on the internet.
But no, this is apparently for spying on regular motorists. I thought we already had cameras for that, but whatever...
Except it literally is.
How do you think rare vaccine side effects have been discovered and recorded? By collecting thousands of "anecdotes" from individuals reporting anomalous symptoms.
How do you think illicit drug harm is measured? They can't exactly pump people full of cocaine and ketamine in a lab to study overdose effects - you collect anecdotes (individual cases), catalog them, aggregate and adjust for sample bias.
Anecdotes are individual, cherry-picked testimonies. When you collect enough of them you get a statistically significant data point. It may be biased based on how your data was collected but the same can be said for many scientific studies that turned out to be flawed in their data collection. As long as you are aware of what the possible bias is, you have data.
I moved to the UK under the same rules (before Brexit) - never moved back home to Iceland :)
A self contained bundle of software with no external dependencies cannot break, because it has no externally changing parts, that should be obvious.
There is no money, taxes or private ownership without "violence".
Absolutely no way in hell I'm going to make it a critical path if my process, though, because that's exactly the sort of product Google might just shut down with a week's notice because it didn't make enough money that quarter.
Basically, rather than being just a chatbot, if we can give the AI the ability to make HTTP requests, it can literally interact with the world around it. To me, this feels like a question of when, not if.
Once the "chatbot" can interact with Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Tinder, etc. some really scary stuff can start to happen (because people will program them to):
* AI agents will start impersonating real people with the intent of stealing their identity, performing bank fraud, conning friends and family out of money, etc.
* AI agents will destroy dating sites, and probably be used for blackmail.
* AI agents will be used to engage customer support staff and trick them into giving access to your online accounts.
* Propaganda bot farms will go from being "relatively easy" to "absolutely trivial". Have an agenda you want to push? Flood every social media platform with fake activity on the topic.
I can definitely see a possibility where the current internet as we know it just gets flooded with AI crap, and humans will have to build entirely new technologies to replace the old World Wide Web, with real-world identity checks to enable access to it, and so on. Oh, and probably some kind of punitive system for people who abuse their access (chinese social credit style)
Most computers are not compromised because of flaws in cryptography or the application thereof, they are compromised because of operational security (opening suspicious email attachments, reusing passwords, running systems with default admin passwords, etc). These things have little to do with cryptography and are much better understood as "cybersecurity".
Telling the client "I'm sorry, your account is frozen pending an investigation" might land you in jail. You literally MUST lie to them and feed them a bunch of bullshit.
It's a shitty system, but interestingly, one that was developed by the EU, not specifically the UK.
Your options are; wait until some nameless government agency realises they've made a mistake, and releases your funds, or start a lawsuit and spend lots of time and money fighting to get your money back.
The UK no longer makes anything. We facilitate and service. But that type of work only works for certain people, with certain skills, in certain areas.
The same goes for many other western economies.